User Experience (UX) Design - ILEAD U 2014

Table of Contents

Introduction

I have the honor of teaching another course during the October meeting of ILEAD U: a course on Community Outreach for Librarians. This topic is somewhat different than the User Experience (UX) Design courses I taught last time.

June Introduction

This was the introduction for the June 2014 ILEAD U session. I have kept it here for reference purposes.

User Experience (UX) Design is more of a holistic approach to design than a particular method. In fact, there are many different design methods that form the toolbox which UX design draws from. In the first class we will have equal emphasis on presenting what UX design is, and in exploring some of the methods that are used when doing design from a UX perspective.

Paper Prototyping is an iterative design method, one of several such methods that are used in UX design. It is a particularly engaging method that will allow you to get some hands-on experience actually doing design, and as an exercise, gives you a sense of how UX design actually works. To get a sense of the importance of iterations of design ideas, it is important to have the opportunity to develop multiple versions of a single design. Thus, 90% of the second course will be devoted to hands-on prototyping: developing a design, testing it out, and then iterating the design in response to what was learned.

In both of the courses I will try to emphasize your group projects. Not all of the group projects will necessarily lend themselves to each method we will cover. And I do not know how many people from each group will attend each class session, so we may have to compromise there too. UX design in general, and paper prototyping in particular, are both very much group activities that are difficult if not impossible to do by yourself, so the courses will be structured accordingly.

Other Info

Instructor Bio

Ingbert Schmidt is a PhD candidate at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He has taught technology and design related classes including Entrepreneurial IT Design, Web Technologies and Techniques, Museum Informatics, and Social Aspects of Information Technology. His research interests include design methods, knowledge management, and sociotechnical systems, and his dissertation research involves studying how organizations preserve and communicate how-to knowledge over multiple generations of participants.